ngth for the approaching struggle;
that his father and mother were quiet good people, inclined, but not
immoderately, to that persuasion; that he went up to Cambridge early,
and had some kind of dissension with the authorities there; that the
course of his youth was in a singular degree pure and staid; that in
boyhood he was a devourer of books, and that he early became, and
always remained, a severely studious man; that he married and had
difficulties of a peculiar character with his first wife; that he wrote
on divorce: that after the death of his first wife, he married a second
time a lady who died very soon, and a third time a person who survived
him more than fifty years; that he wrote early poems of singular
beauty, which we still read; that he travelled in Italy, and exhibited
his learning in the academies there; that he plunged deep in the
theological and political controversies of his time; that he kept a
school,--or rather, in our more modern phrase, took pupils; that he was
a republican of a peculiar kind, and of "no church," which Dr. Johnson
thought dangerous;[4] that he was Secretary for Foreign Languages under
the Long Parliament, and retained that office after the _coup d'etat_
of Cromwell; that he defended the death of Charles I., and became blind
from writing a book in haste upon that subject; that after the
Restoration he was naturally in a position of some danger and much
difficulty; that in the midst of that difficulty he wrote "Paradise
Lost"; that he did not fail in "heart or hope," [5] but lived for
fourteen years after the destruction of all for which he had labored,
in serene retirement, "though fallen on evil days, though fallen on
evil times," [6]--all this we have heard from our boyhood. How much is
wanting to complete the picture--how many traits both noble and
painful, might be recovered from the past--we shall never know, till
some biographer skilled in interpreting the details of human nature
shall select this subject for his art. All that we can hope to do in
an essay like this is, to throw together some miscellaneous remarks on
the character of the Puritan poet, and on the peculiarities of his
works; and if in any part of them we may seem to make unusual
criticisms, and to be over-ready with depreciation or objection, our
excuse must be, that we wish to paint a likeness and that the harsher
features of the subject should have a prominence even in an outline.

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